SCAPPETTONE/BERLANT @ THE CO-OP

I feel very lucky to be in conversation with Lauren Berlant this Friday evening about my new book, The Republic of Exit 43. We promise to time things so that you can eat dinner and go dancing afterwards! Presented in partnership with the Program in Poetry and Poetics at the Seminary Co-op Bookstore

"The Republic of Exit 43" is a verbal/visual archaeology of the hazardous waste sites across the street from home and school, tucked behind the portal of an expressway: domains mute and seemingly inert. Composting Alice's adventures underground, verse channels unearthed disputes surrounding a noxious landfill and adjoining copper rod mill through the throats of nether and overworlds, from Eurydice to CEOs—mining landscape as retribution, baffle, legal battle and real estate speculation, deregulation, rogue digging and pastoral pipe dreams on the part of the harmed. Amidst the stupefaction of innumerable private and state ruses, these pages lay out how the entrails of postwar industry might be reclaimed toward a music of non–consensual citizenship where poetry is unregulated and fully integral.

About the author: Jennifer Scappettone works at the crossroads of writing, translation, and scholarly research, on the page and off. She is the author of the cross-genre verse books "From Dame Quickly" and "The Republic of Exit 43: Outtakes & Scores from an Archaeology and Pop-Up Opera of the Corporate Dump," and of the critical study "Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice." Her translations of the polyglot poet Amelia Rosselli are collected in the award-winning book "Locomotrix: Selected Poetry and Prose of Amelia Rosselli." She is Associate Professor of English, Creative Writing, and Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago.

About the interlocutor: Lauren Berlant is George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor of English at the University of Chicago. Her most recent books are "Cruel Optimism" (2011); Desire/Love (2012) and, with Lee Edelman, "Sex, or the Unbearable" (2014). She and Sianne Ngai edited Comedy, an Issue (2017) for the journal Critical Inquiry, of which Berlant is co-editor. She blogs at Supervalent Thought (www.supervalentthought.com).